Smear:
Mark Lloyd Wants To Reinstate The Fairness Doctrine

September 17, 2009 10:01 am ET

While conservatives in the media have called Lloyd a "neo-Nazi" who wants to shut down conservative media, he has explicitly rejected the premise of the Fairness Doctrine. He simply wants to "expand media opportunities for women, people of color, small businesses, and those living in rural areas."

Smear

Mark Lloyd Wants To Reinstate The Fairness Doctrine

Conservatives have called Mark Lloyd a "neo-Nazi" who wants to silence "conservatives in the media."

Sources

The Truth

The most absurd attacks have come from pundits like
right-wing radio host Michael Savage, who has called Lloyd a "neo-Nazi"
and "piece of garbage" intent on closing down "conservatives in the media." He
said that Lloyd's title - Chief Diversity Officer - is "code word for the KGB."
For the record, Lloyd has a distinguished career
on communications policy issues. Most recently he was a vice president at
the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights and a senior fellow at the Center for
American Progress. He taught communications policy at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, served as general counsel to the Benton Foundation,
worked as a communications attorney at a major D.C. law firm, and has nearly 20
years of experience in journalism.

The right wing's main problem with Lloyd is a CAP/Free Press
report he co-authored in 2007 called "The
Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio." The report's authors explicitly
state that they do not think the Fairness Doctrine should be reinstated, and
Lloyd has since said that he has "no
plans or interest" to resurrect the law. Nevertheless, conservatives are
insisting that that goal is really Lloyd's secret plan. [...]

-- MYTH #1: Conservative voices will be kicked off the air.
The report actually argues that telling radio broadcasters what to put on the
air is inappropriate. What the report advocates for are policies that promote
local programming, so what's on the air is responsive to those communities and
their advertisers, as opposed to national syndicators and large station group
business models. Right now, the regulatory structure pushes out locally-owned,
minority-owned, and female-owned stations. "[D]iversifying the marketplace"
will not necessarily create more progressive talk radio; it may even get more
conservative. It all depends on the on the location and interests of the
community.

-- MYTH #2: Lloyd wants to impose more taxes and fines on
broadcasters. [...] The report argues that if broadcast stations don't
want to do local programming, they can pay a fine and get out of doing it. That
money would go to the local public radio station for local programming.

-- MYTH #3: Progressives secretly want a return to the Fairness
Doctrine. [...] As Lloyd has explained, the Fairness Doctrine "never
by itself fostered coverage of important issues in a way that spoke to the
diversity of interests in local communities across our country. In the late
1960's, the supposed golden age of the Fairness Doctrine, the Kerner Commission
reported the failure of mainstream media to report on minority communities."

Lloyd
Wants To Encourage Local, Minority-Owned Media.
On
September 16, 50 groups signed a letter supporting Lloyd against right-wing
smears. According to the letter, "Lloyd, an established scholar and respected public
servant, was hired by the FCC to expand media opportunities for women, people
of color, small businesses, and those living in rural areas. It's a tough job,
considering the abysmal state of diversity in mainstream media."
[StopBigMedia.com, 9/16/09]